Chapter 12

Klinker evidently felt that all bars were down as to him. It would be a hard world indeed if a trainer was denied free access to his only pupil, and Klinker, though he had but the one, was always in as full blast as Muldoon's. He had acquired a habit of "dropping in" at all hours, especially late at night, which, to say the least, was highly wasteful of time. It was Queed's privilege to tell Klinker that he must keep away from the Scriptorium; but in that case Klinker might fairly retort that he would no longer give the Doc free physical culture. Did he care to bring that issue to the touch? No, he did not. In fact, he must admit that he had a distinct need of Buck, a distinct dependence upon him, for awhile yet at any rate. So he could make no elimination of the non-essential there.

Then there was Fifi. In a week, or possibly two weeks, Fifi would doubtless reappear in his dining-room, and if she had no lessons to trouble him with, she would at any rate feel herself free to talk to him whenever the whim moved her. Had she not let out this very day that she considered that she had a kind of title to his time? So it would be to the end of the chapter. It had been his privilege to tell Fifi that he could not spare her another minute of time till his work was finished.... Had been--but no longer was. Looking back now, he found it impossible to reconstruct the chain of impulse and circumstance which had trapped him into it, but the stark fact was that his own lips had authorized Fifi to profane at will his holy time. Not three hours before he had been betrayed into weakly telling her that he was her friend. He was a man of truth and honor. He could not possibly get back of that confession of friendship, or of the privileges it bestowed. So there was no elimination of the non-essential he could make there.

These were the short and ugly facts. And now he must take official cognizance of them.

With a leaden heart and the hands of lamentation, he took the Schedule to pieces and laboriously fitted it together again with a fire-new item in its midst. The item was Human Intercourse, and to it he allotted the sum of thirty minutes per diem.

It was a historic moment in his life, and, unlike most men at such partings of the ways, he was fully conscious of it. Nevertheless, he passed straight from it to another performance hardly less extraordinary. From his table drawer he produced a little memorandum book, and in it--just below a diagram of a new chest-developing exercise invented last night by Klinker--he jotted down the things that Fifi said a man must do to be like other men.

A clean half-hour remained before he must go and call on the young lady with the tom-boy name, Charles Weyland, who knew "what the public liked." He spent it, he, the indefatigable minute-shaver, sitting with the head that no longer ached clamped in his hand. It had been the most disturbing day of his life, but he was not thinking of that exactly. He was thinking what a mistake it had been to leave New York. There he had had but two friends with no possibility of getting any more. Here--it was impossible to blink the fact any longer--he already had two, with at least two more determinedly closing in on him. He had Fifi and he had Buck--yes, Buck; the young lady Charles Weyland had offered him her friendship this very day; and unless he looked alive he would wake up some morning to find that Nicolovius also had captured him as a friend.

He was far better off in New York, where days would go by in which he never saw Tim or Murphy Queed. And yet ... did he want to go back?

XIII

_"Taking the Little Doctor Down a Peg or Two": as performed for the First and Only Time by Sharlee Weyland._

The Star that fought in its course for men through Sharlee Weyland was of the leal and resolute kind. It did not swerve at a squall. Sharlee had thought the whole thing out, and made up her mind. Gentle raillery, which would do everything necessary in most cases, would be wholly futile here. She must doff all gloves and give the little Doctor the dressing-down of his life. She must explode a mine under that enormously exaggerated self-esteem which swamped the young man's personality like a goitre. Sharlee did not want to do this. She liked Mr. Queed, in a peculiar sort of way, and yet she had to make it impossible for him ever to speak to her again. Her nature was to give pleasure, and therefore she was going to do her utmost to give him pain. She wanted him to like her, and consequently she was going to insult him past forgiveness. And she was not even sure that it was going to do him any good.

When her guest walked into her little back parlor that evening, Sharlee was feeling very self-sacrificing and noble. However, she merely looked uncommonly pretty and tremendously engrossed in herself. She was in evening dress. It was Easter Monday, and at nine, as it chanced, she was to go out under the escortage of Charles Gardiner West to some forgathering of youth and beauty. But her costume was so perfectly suited to the little curtain-raiser called Taking the Little Doctor Down a Peg or Two, that it might have been appointed by a clever stage-manager with that alone in mind. She was the haughty beauty, the courted princess, graciously bestowing a few minutes from her crowding fêtes upon some fourth-rate dependant. And indeed the little Doctor, with his prematurely old face and his shabby clothes, rather looked the part of the dependant. Sharlee's greeting was of the briefest.

"Ah, Mr. Queed.... Sit down."

Her negligent nod set him away at an immense distance; even he was aware that Charles Weyland had undergone some subtle but marked change since the morning. The colored maid who had shown him in was retained to button her mistress' long gloves. It proved to be a somewhat slow process. Over the mantel hung a gilt-framed mirror, as wide as the mantel itself. To this mirror, the gloves buttoned, Miss Weyland passed, and reviewed her appearance with slow attention, giving a pat here, making a minor readjustment there. But this survey did not suffice for details, it seemed; a more minute examination was needed; over the floor she trailed with leisurely grace, and rang the bell.

"Oh, Mary--my vanity-box, please. On the dressing-table."

Seating herself under the lamp, she produced from the contrivance the tiniest little mirror ever seen. As she raised it to let it perform its dainty function, her glance fell on Queed, sitting darkly in his rocking-chair. A look of mild surprise came into her eye: not that it was of any consequence, but plainly she had forgotten that he was there.

"Oh ... You don't mind waiting a few minutes?"

"I do m--"

"You promised half an hour I think? Never fear that I shall take longer--"

"I did not promise half an hour for such--"

"It was left to me to decide in what way the time should be employed, I believe. What I have to say can be said briefly, but to you, at least, it should prove immensely interesting." She stifled a small yawn with the gloved finger-tips of her left hand. "However, of course don't let me keep you if you are pressed for time."

The young man made no reply. Sharlee completed at her leisure her conference with the vanity-box; snapped the trinket shut; and, rising, rang the bell again. This time she required a glass of water for her good comfort. She drank it slowly, watching herself in the mantel mirror as she did so, and setting down the glass, took a new survey of her whole effect, this time in a long-distance view.

"Now, Mr. Queed!"

She sat down in a flowered arm-chair so large that it engulfed her, and fixed him with a studious, puckering gaze as much as to say: "Let's see. Now, what was his trouble?"

"Ah, yes!--the _Post_."

She glanced at the little clock on the mantel, appeared to gather in her thoughts from remote and brilliant places, and addressed the dingy youth briskly but not unkindly.

"Unfortunately, I have an engagement this evening and can give you very little time. You will not mind if I am brief. Here, then, is the case. A man employed in a minor position on a newspaper is notified that he is to be discharged for incompetence. He replies that, so far from being discharged, he will be promoted at the end of a month, and will eventually be made editor of the paper. Undoubtedly this is a magnificent boast, but to make it good means a complete transformation in the character of this man's work--namely, from entire incompetence to competence of an unusual sort, all within a month's time. You are the man who has made this extraordinary boast. To clear the ground before I begin to show you where your trouble is, please tell me how you propose to make it good."

Not every man feeling inside as the little Doctor felt at that moment would have answered with such admirable calm.

"I purpose," he corrected her, "to take the files of the _Post_ for the past few years and read all of Colonel Cowles's amusing articles. He, I am informed, is the editorial mogul and paragon. I purpose to study those articles scientifically, to analyze them, to take them apart and see exactly how they are put together. I purpose to destroy my own style and build up another one precisely like the Colonel's--if anything, a shade more so. In short I purpose to learn to write like an ass, of asses, for asses."

"That is your whole programme?"

"It is more than enough, I think."

"Ah?" She paused a moment, looking at him with faint, distant amusement. "Now, as my aunt's business woman, I, of course, take an interest in the finances of her boarders. Therefore I had better begin at once looking about for a new place for you after May 15th. What other kinds of work do you think yourself qualified to do, besides editorial writing and the preparation of thesauruses?"

He looked at her darkly. "You imagine that the _Post_ will discharge me on May 15th?"

"There is nothing in the world that seems to me so certain."

"And why?"

"Why will the Post discharge you? For exactly the same reason it promises to discharge you now. Incompetence."

"You agree with Colonel Cowles, then? You consider me incompetent to write editorials for the _Post_?"

"Oh, totally. And it goes a great deal deeper than style, I assure you. Mr. Queed, you're all wrong from the beginning."

Her eyes left his face; went first to the clock; glanced around the room. Sharlee's dress was blue, and her neck was as white as a wave's foamy tooth. Her manner was intended to convey to Mr. Queed that he was the smallest midge on all her crowded horizon. It did not, of course, have that effect, but it did arrest and pique his attention most successfully. It was in his mind that Charles Weyland had been of some assistance to him in first suggesting work on the _Post_; and again about the roses for Fifi. He was still ready to believe that she might have some profitable suggestion about his new problem. Was she not that "public" and that "average reader" which he himself so despised and detested? Yet he could not imagine where such a little pink and white chit found the hardihood to take this tone with one of the foremost scientists of modern times.

"You interest me. I am totally incompetent now; I will be totally incompetent on May 15th; this because I am all wrong from the beginning. Pray proceed."

Sharlee, her thoughts recalled, made a slight inclination of her head. "Forgive my absent-mindedness. First, then, as to why you are a failure as an editorial writer. You are quite mistaken in supposing that it is a mere question of style, though right in regarding your style as in itself a fatal handicap. However, the trouble has its root in your amusing attitude of superiority to the work. You think of editorial writing as small hack-work, entirely beneath the dignity of a man who has had one or two articles accepted by a prehistoric magazine which nobody reads. In reality, it is one of the greatest and most splendid of all professions, fit to call out the very best of a really big man. You chuckle and sneer at Colonel Cowles and think yourself vastly his superior as an editorial writer, when, in the opinion of everybody else, he is in every way your superior. I doubt if the _Post_ has a single reader who would not prefer to read an article by him, on any subject, to reading an article by you. I doubt if there is a paper in the world that would not greatly prefer him as an editor to you--"

"You are absurdly mistaken," he interrupted coldly. "I might name various papers--"

"Yes, the _Political Science Quarterly_ and the _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_." Sharlee smiled tolerantly, and immediately resumed: "When you sit down at the office to write an article, whom do you think you are writing for? A company of scientists? An institute of gray-bearded scholars? An academy of fossilized old doctors of laws? There are not a dozen people of that sort who read the _Post_. Has it never occurred to you to call up before your mind's eye the people you actually are writing for? You can see them any day as you walk along the street. Go into a street car at six o'clock any night and look around at the faces. There is your public, the readers of the _Post_--shop-clerks, stenographers, factory-hands, office-men, plumbers, teamsters, drummers, milliners. Look at them. Have you anything to say to interest them? Think. If they were to file in here now and ask you to make a few remarks, could you, for the life of you, say one single thing that would interest them?"

"I do not pretend, or aspire," said Mr. Queed, "to dispense frothy nothings tricked out to beguile the tired brick-layer. My duty is to give forth valuable information and ripened judgment couched in language--"

"No, your duty is to get yourself read; if you fail there you fail everywhere. Is it possible that you don't begin to grasp that point yet? I fancied that your mind was quicker. You appear to think that the duty of a newspaper is to back people up against a wall and ram helpful statistics into them with a force-pump. You are grotesquely mistaken. Your ideal newspaper would not keep a dozen readers in this city: that is to say, it would be a complete failure while it lasted and would bankrupt Mr. Morgan in six months. A dead newspaper is a useless one, the world over. At the same time, every living and good newspaper is a little better, spreads a little more sweetness and light, gives out a little more valuable information, ripened judgment, et cetera, than the vast majority of its readers want or will absorb. The _Post_ is that sort of newspaper. It is constantly tugging its readers a little higher than they--I mean the majority, and not the cultured few--are willing to go. But the _Post_ always recognizes that its first duty is to get itself read: if it does not succeed in that, it lacks the principle of life and dies. Perhaps the tired bricklayer you speak of, the middle-class, commonplace, average people who make up nearly all of the world, ought to be interested in John Stuart Mill's attitude toward the single-tax. But the fact is that they aren't. The _Post_ wisely deals with the condition, and not a theory: it means to get itself read. It is your first duty, as a writer for it, to get yourself read. If you fail to get yourself read, you are worse than useless to the _Post_. Well, you have completely failed to do this, and that is why the _Post_ is discharging you. Come, free yourself from exaggerated notions about your own importance and look at this simple point with the calm detachment of a scientist. The _Post_ can save money, while preserving just the same effect, by discharging you and printing every morning a half-column from the Encyclopedia Britannica."

She rose quickly, as though her time was very precious, and passed over to the table, where a great bowl of violets stood. The room was pretty: it had reminded Queed, when he entered it, of Nicolovius's room, though there was a softer note in it, as the flowers, the work-bag on the table, the balled-up veil and gloves on the mantel-shelf. He had liked, too, the soft-shaded lamps; the vague resolve had come to him to install a lamp in the Scriptorium later on. But now, thinking of nothing like this, he sat in a thick silence gazing at her with unwinking sternness.

Sharlee carefully gathered the violets from the bowl, shook a small shower of water from their stems, dried them with a pocket handkerchief about the size of a silver dollar. Next she wrapped the stems with purple tinfoil, tied them with a silken cord and tassel and laid the gorgeous bunch upon a magazine back, to await her further pleasure. Then, coming back, she resumed her seat facing the shabby young man she was assisting to see himself as others saw him.

"I might," she said, "simply stop there. I might tell you that you are a failure as an editorial writer because you have nothing at all to say that is of the smallest interest to the great majority of the readers of editorials, and would not know how to say it if you had. That would be enough to satisfy most men, but I see that I must make things very plain and definite for you. Mr. Queed, you are a failure as an editorial writer because you are first a failure in a much more important direction. You're a failure as a human being--as a man."

She was watching his face lightly, but closely, and so she was on her feet as soon as he, and had her hand out before he had even thought of making this gesture.

"It is useless for this harangue to continue," he said, with a brow of storm. "Your conception of helpful advice ..."

But Sharlee's voice, which had begun as soon as his, drowned him out.... "Complimented you a little too far, I see. I shall be sure to remember after this," she said with such a sweet smile, "that, after all your talk, you are just the average man, and want to hear only what flatters your little vanity. _Good_-night. So nice to have seen you."

She nodded brightly, with faint amusement, and turning away, moved off toward the door at the back. Queed, of course, had no means of knowing that she was thinking, almost jubilantly: "I _knew_ that mouth meant spirit!" He only knew that, whereas he had meant to terminate the interview with a grave yet stinging rebuke to her, she had given the effect of terminating the interview with a graceful yet stinging rebuke to him. This was not what he wanted in the least. Come to think of it, he doubted if he wanted the interview to end at all.

"Miss Weyland ..."

She turned on the threshold of the farther door. "I beg your pardon! I thought you'd gone! Your hat?--I think you left it in the hall, didn't you?"

"It is not my hat."

"Oh--what is it?"

"God knows," said the little Doctor, hoarsely.

He was standing in the middle of the floor, his hands jammed into his trousers pockets, his hair tousled over a troubled brow, his breast torn by emotions which were entirely new in his experience and which he didn't even know the names of. All the accumulation of his disruptive day was upon him. He felt both terrifically upset inside, and interested to the degree of physical pain in something or other, he had no idea what. Presently he started walking up and down the room, nervous as a caged lion, eyes fixed on space or on something within, while Sharlee stood in the doorway watching him casually and unsurprised, as though just this sort of thing took place in her little parlor regularly, seven nights a week.

"Go ahead! Go ahead!" he broke out abruptly, coming to a halt. "Pitch into me. Do it for all you're worth. I suppose you think it's what I need."

"Certainly," said Sharlee, pleasantly.

She stood beside her chair again, flushed with a secret sense of victory, liking him more for his temper and his control than she ever could have liked him for his learning. But it was not her idea that the little Doctor had got it anywhere near hard enough as yet.

"Won't you sit down, Mr. Queed?"

It appeared that Mr. Queed would.

"I am paying you the extraordinary compliment," said Sharlee, "of talking to you as others might talk about you behind your back--in fact, as everybody does talk about you behind your back. I do this on the theory that you are a serious and honest-minded man, sincerely interested in learning the truth about yourself and your failures, so that you may correct them. If you are interested only in having your vanity fed by flattering fictions, please say so right now. I have no time," she said, hardly able for her life to suppress a smile, "for butterflies and triflers."

_Butterflies and triflers!_ Mr. Queed, proprietor of the famous Schedule, a butterfly and a trifler!

He said in a muffled voice: "Proceed."

"Since an editorial writer," said Sharlee, seating herself and beginning with a paragraph as neat as a public speaker's, "must be able, as his first qualification, to interest the common people, it is manifest that he must be interested in the common people. He must feel his bond of humanity with them, sympathize with them, like them, love them. This is the great secret of Colonel Cowles's success as an editor. A fine gentleman by birth, breeding, and tradition, he is yet always a human being among human beings. All his life he has been doing things with and for the people. He went all through the war, and you might have thought the whole world depended on him, the way he went up Cemetery Ridge on the 3rd of July, 1863. He was shot all to pieces, but they patched him together, and the next year there he was back in the fighting around Petersburg. After the war he was a leader against the carpet-baggers, and if this State is peaceful and prosperous and comfortable for you to live in now, it is because of what men like him and my father did a generation ago. When he took the _Post_ he went on just the same, working and thinking and fighting for men and with men, and all in the service of the people. I suppose, of course, his views through all these years have not always been sound, but they have always been honest and honorable, sensible, manly, and sweet. And they have always had a practical relation with the life of the people. The result is that he has thousands and thousands of readers who feel that their day has been wanting in something unless they have read what he has to say. There is Colonel Cowles--Does this interest you, Mr. Queed? If not, I need not weary us both by continuing."

He again requested her, in the briefest possible way, to proceed.